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Summary

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language that is used to write technical manuals in such a way that they can be more easily understood by an international audience. STE helps to make translations cheaper and more accurate. Often a formal requirement for aircraft and defence maintenance documentation, STE can easily be adapted to all technical industries and beyond. Ms. Shumin Chen will teach participants how to correctly and effectively use STE in practice. She will also address some of the mistakes commonly found in technical writing and the frequently incorrect use of common STE writing rules.

STE is a ‘way of life’ in the field of technical writing and documentation. The ASD-STE100 exercises covered a wide spectrum of topics from choosing between approved and non-approved words to recreating documentation in STE. Shumin expertly guides us from classroom learning mode to real-life practical application of STE rules. The materials that she presented were informative and very convincing.” Martin Broekhuis, Technical Editor, Webasto.

Course outline*

• Practical overview of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
• How STE helps both native & non-native speakers of English
• Writing rules and how to apply them in practice
• How to use the general vocabulary
• How to deal with industry-specific terminology
• How to use STE for various documentation types
• How to implement STE with minimal disruption to on-going production and existing documentation
• Hands-on STE editing and review

* Shufrans also offers customised ASD-STE100 training solutions tailored to meet your specific requirements. These courses are normally provided at the customer’s premises.

Who should attend?

• Compliance managers
• CIO, COO, CTO
• Customer support managers
• Documentation managers
• Editors
• Engineering managers
• Engineers and SMEs who create documentation
• ILS managers
• Maintenance managers
• Operation managers
• Product managers
• Project managers
• Quality managers
• Technical writers
• Translation managers
• Translators

What training outcomes to expect?

Our interactive training, exercises and workshop, will teach participants to standardise content to:

• Author more efficiently
• Communicate more effectively with a global audience
• Improve operational safety
• Reduce AOG / downtime
• Facilitate modular writing and reuse
• Facilitate teamwork
• Facilitate translation
• Maximise consistency
• Optimise product lifecycle support
• Reduce the cost of creating and maintaining technical publications

Trainer’s qualifications

Ms. Shumin Chen, principal trainer & consultant at Shufrans TechDocs received her professional on-the-job training in the field of STE under the tutelage of Dr Frans Wijma, a linguist and documentation expert. Together as an experienced global team, they provided their combined knowledge and dedication to benefit customers worldwide. To date, they have provided training and consultancy services to over 180 companies. Shufrans TechDocs is the only company with such vast experience in providing certified STE training.

Shumin has supported various companies with their STE and other documentation needs, based on standards where possible. Although STE was developed for the aerospace industry, more specifically for aircraft maintenance documentation, Shumin found that it made a lot of sense to apply the same principles to other industries and types of documents as well. Few -if any- changes to the specification are necessary to adapt STE to industries ranging from machinery to IT, automotive to medical equipment.

This training workshop is hosted by Citec Finland, our preferred training partner in Finland.

Why Simplified Technical English (STE)?

Whether you are looking to implement working standards such as DITA, S1000D, ATA iSpec 2200, RailDex, or ShipDex to standardise your information structure and facilitate content re-use, it is important to give due consideration to the quality of your source text when creating your technical content. Ambiguous or inconsistently worded documentation can result in non-compliant data deliveries, poor customer support, potential legal liabilities, equipment damage, as well as safety risks.

A well-written source text ensures the ease of downstream content management processes such as translations

Improved readability for your technical content

STE prescribes the use of grammar rules that are relatively more restrictive than the standard rules of the English language.

The general vocabulary has only 900 approved words while explicitly listing 1500 other non-approved words with alternative suggestions.

By introducing these grammar and vocabulary restrictions, technical authors can avoid writing overly long sentences and leave out unnecessary technical details where applicable, all of which are obstacles to the ease of readability and sound understanding.

Recommended by global documentation standards

Military defence standards (MIL-SPEC / MIL-STD) such as MIL-STD-3048, as well as technical documentation standards like S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200 recommend the use of ASD-STE100.

Although the S1000D standard was originally intended for the aerospace and defence industry, this widely successful specification has been customised for the shipping and train manufacturing and operations communities giving rise to both ShipDex and RailDex. Likewise, sound and consistent STE writing rules are highly applicable and practical for use across industries.

Simplifying or eliminating the need for translations?

STE is an international aerospace standard that helps to make technical documentation easy to understand. However, the benefits of STE have proven very highly applicable to all industries. That is why 60% of STE users today come from industries outside of aerospace & defence.

Understandably, STE was designed with non-native speakers of the English language in mind. By providing technical writers with a common set of standardised writing rules and general vocabulary, STE enables teams of writers to write technical manuals that are consistently accurate and require less proofreading and editing effort. Consequently, this does away with the need for translations altogether.

Besides the aerospace maintenance industry however, product exports are still subjected to much scrutiny in terms of their paperwork, documentation and associated product translations. Therefore, the use of STE to create technical content can support downstream translation processes in several ways:

• A 900-word general vocabulary dictionary eliminates the need for other non-approved, and possibly uncommon synonyms. This reduces the likelihood of term-related clarifications and queries from translators, resulting in faster translation processes.
• Enforcing STE rules strictly guarantees a high level of consistency at word-, phrase-, and sentence-levels.  This allows project managers to leverage on existing translation memories to substantially reduce translation costs.
• With fewer technical terms to translate and a more uniform translation memory, translators can provide cheaper, faster and better translations thanks to STE.
• Having STE content in place will result in exceptional translation quality with machine translations as well.

In a nutshell

For many years now, the use of STE as a controlled language authoring strategy has successfully taken off not just at large organisations, but also in small and medium enterprises.

With professional Simplified Technical English training that costs only a fraction of supposed “full implementation”, and yet achieves 75% – 85% of the benefits and results of an approach that includes checker software, getting started with STE is no longer the major and expensive investment it used to be.

Training technical writers and engineers to write in STE within two to three days may sound like a simple and straightforward undertaking. However, to change the way your technical authoring team works does require some managerial direction while the team transits to STE. Trained technical writers will experience on a more regular basis, the many benefits that STE as a controlled language writing strategy offers.